Creative with Technology

Feeling Discouraged – Mental Health CHECK

I hope you are well, that your life is not a daily struggle. I just returned from the MIghty Oaks Warrior Program. I am still homeless but staying on a friends couch until I can find work and a vehicle. Hopefully, a place to live. I am trying my best to not fall into depression over all this the past months have dealt my way.

I have a lot of Mental Health struggles and lately been getting better. I don’t want to say I have failed. I don’t want to give up hope or be a victim. People see that I am still able to do some things like coding and design. My mind is still sharp and I am on medication that is treating my illnesses.

What I have been diagnosed with is Bipolar Disorder/ Posttraumatic Stress as well. I know how I have PTS and Bipolar I believe I was born with it. I struggled for years medicating both sometimes on my own. Before I knew what was happening to me. I had made strides the past three years and feel as though this is just a set back.

Monday I see a caseworker and I am trying to figure out what I need to do to live a life that isn’t a battle daily. I do not wish to not be working, just I feel since some of my battles are public information. Another interview to be turned down once again that is causing a great deal of anxiety. I tried a few months ago and took a job in construction yet still couldn’t afford a place to live.

I also tried to develop an application to change my situation. It didn’t succeed and so my life quickly fell apart. I was holding on daily working my ass off physically only to sleep in my van at night. If I could even find a place to park and sleep. Which is nearly impossible in San Diego.

How did all this happen to occur and how do I graduate at the top of my class. Help start successful companies, show art, research for universities. Also, be a professor maybe it’s because during all that I had a second life.

That of a man with Bipolar and PTS from mainly a traumatic life. I worked as an Emergency Medical Technician running calls for the fire company. Even there I was a success until a day occurred and I broke once again. It all came to a halt and so did my recovery which at that time was almost six years sober.

I always took on a lot and a friend said this to me… You always did your best until your best took the best out of you.. Thanks, Dianna. She and her family are letting me stay with them. So many people came to help me yet many didn’t that is not upsetting its life.

What is it like to struggle daily and why did I become a top performer at almost everything. I was feeling insecure about my entire life. I felt this because from the age of 6 to about 11 years old I was horrifically abused. Not by my family but by others. I suffered every day while my mom was fighting cancer.

I felt so much anger and this anger I turned inward to self-hate. I tried as I got older to comprehend what I had occurred as a child and I couldn’t. Every night as a kid I didn’t want to wake up the next day. As a teen, this got worse and I was in years of major depression. The mania only happened around my first year in college. I was also top of the class there and even set a curve in a master course. I was there nonmatriculated with a GED. I dropped out and left home in tenth grade.

The way was I eventually was homeless and traveling then. I had a dream an had to prove I could go to Alaska to work the boats. Some events I don’t discuss and mainly it was also my wish to die was real. Which others took as fearlessness or recklessness. It was an escape and I was depressed the only thing that made me alive was adrenaline. Maybe dopamine was the issue. I took risks after risks. Got into extreme backcountry snowboarding and hitchhiking even from Montana to Nevada and back.

I thought I wouldn’t ever die. I did though we all do and sometimes we die when we are still alive. WE CHANGE in the blink of an eye. That is what I am trying to express here. My heart has been in service for others and I made amends for my bad choices. My living one was to give back to the community as an EMT. I have seen more people in trauma, done CPR and seen the worst things I could imagine happen.

I also have to say we saved a great deal of people lives. I couldn’t fully separate emotionally from them. Which made me good at my job until I broke. I was so good I scored a 99% driving and written tests for the course. Man, that was a rush the same training course the police used.

Back to the call that changes me. I was transporting a 51/50 call which is a danger to self and others. We ran a lot of these to the point it was just a no brainer. Why this one broke me I don’t know I quit the job and was ill. I told them I was going to be back at school fulltime. I just need to stop. I lost about 35 pounds leading up to and after this. I stopped eating and sleeping barely at all. My life crumbled.

I had PTS and it was in the 90s no one talked about it then. We sort of had a code to not talk about it. I was sick and relapsed eventually on alcohol. I suffered night terrors most of my life and only worsened. The call is not easy to describe and almost felt like a hallucination or spiritual attack. Read on but this might from here be too much to hear.

The patient was seeming possessed by a force. I do not talk about it today we just say he was mentally ill. It seemed more than that he had carved swastika and pentagrams into his own face. I am both a man that believes in God and Science. So take this as you will.

He was able to talk about people I knew by name. Many of them the entire ride and he said that I was going to go to hell. It was just too unreal to brush aside as mental illness. I don’t know why this one was it but it scared the soul out of me. This wasn’t even close to the worst things I have seen so many I have almost fuzzy memories of them. I plan to start a new form of treatment to help me deal with them. Process them my trauma.

So I guess I will write some more tomorrow it is just cathartic to start talking and writing about life.